There's been quote a large uptick in earthquakes in Oklahoma over the last decade.
Are you familiar with the buried mountain range that runs pretty much underneath Interstate 35 down to the Arbuckles?
Those earthquakes are pretty far apart for a localized cause.
Maybe God is angry with Oklahoma.
C A L D E R A ! ! ! AAAAAAAAH!
It just has to be from fracking.
About those quakes, not exactly worth getting shook up about. Anything tip over? Did the water in the pool start sloshing out? Were your windows shaking up a racket like someone was pounding on them? Did any freeway overpasses come down?
There are multiple potential causes of all of these quakes:
1. Earth’s core shifting, possibly pole reversal, no, it won’t cause life on Earth to mutate horribly
2. Fracking for local quakes, as liquids are pumped in and then gas comes out
3. Pumping out all the ground water with accelerated demand with industrialization and the multi-year drought across the US, with the Ogalla and other aquifers drying out. The ground settles to fill in the displaced water, and we get earthquakes.
4. There are lots of major fault zones that haven’t blow in the central US. These tremors might be a precursor of a repeat of the New Madrid quake or something similar.
There are small quakes in the Arbuckles all the time, article must be part of some campaign to get some mo’ Grant Money from Uncle.
Here is a guy - “Dutchsense” - who called the Fukishima quake and tsunami to within a couple of days well in advance along with several others - he has a system that seems to be worth keeping an eye on. You might find him interesting as I do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH7Ngac-2Zc&list=UUHE92x768p8h-fMrqhsnE1Q
Dutch is pretty sure that the OK quake cluster is fracking related, but the jury is still out as to whether it might not be a good thing that stresses are being relieved a little bit at a time - lots of little quakes - which might prevent a major quake later on.
He is warning that we should expect to see more seismic activity along the East Coast and possibly in the New Madrid area as well any time now.
Sometimes you can hear things creaking and cracking days prior to an event...In real big ones cars bounce off their tires in parking lots...
Brick and mason are the first to crumble...Fortunately the wooden stucco structures in places like CA bend and give...but the real old fireplaces go....Had a friend once in the mountains see his stream start flowing from almost dry, just prior to one.
That’s a lot of quakes for a region not known for this kind of frequency.
Hope ya all can avoid any cataclysmic event!
Probably caused by Penn State and/or Minnesota.
I saw this article ...
Oklahoma’s Largest Earthquake ‘Potentially Triggered’ by Smaller Disposal Well Quake, New Study Suggests
Oil and gas industry-related waste water injection may have triggered a cascading sequence of earthquakes that culminated in Oklahoma’s largest earthquake ever recorded, the 5.7-magnitude temblor that struck near Prague in November 2011, a new peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggests.
If true, Oklahoma’s November 2011 earthquake — which injured two people and damaged more than a dozen homes — could be the most powerful earthquake associated with waste water injection, the USGS said in a statement about the research:
The research published this week suggests that the foreshock, by increasing stresses where M5.7 mainshock ruptured, may have triggered the mainshock, which in turn, triggered thousands of aftershocks along the Wilzetta fault system, including a M5.0 aftershock on November 8, 2011.
The paper, “Observations of Static Coulomb Stress Triggering of the November 2011 M5.7 Oklahoma Earthquake Sequence,” was written by Danielle Sumy at the University of Southern California and researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, Cornell, Brown and Columbia universities, and was published on March 7.
One of the study’s co-authors, Cornell’s Katie Keranen, wrote a March 2013 paper in Geology that also linked oil and gas disposal wells to the Prague earthquake. Other peer-reviewed research has linked earthquakes in Oklahoma and other states to oil and gas.
The epicenters of the November 2011 earthquakes were located near disposal wells, but proximity alone isn’t enough to make the link: About 80 percent of the state is located within 9 miles of one of Oklahoma’s 4,000 active disposal wells, according to the Oklahoma Geological Survey. In the new study, the researchers modeled the stresses of the Wilzetta fault line near Prague and concluded that the manner in which the quake sequence progressed and the shallow depth of the quakes, when combined with proximity to disposal wells, points to fluid injection.
“The observation that a human-induced earthquake can trigger a cascade of earthquakes, including a larger one, has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from wastewater injection,” USGS seismologist and study co-author Elizabeth Cochran said in a statement about the research.
Oklahoma has experienced an exponential increase in earthquakes, which many federal and university researchers think is likely linked to disposal wells oil and gas operators use for waste fluid disposal. This waste fluid is produced by hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” — and other types of drilling. Operators inject the waste into the wells, where it’s stored deep underground and away from water supplies.
Other states like Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio and Texas have experienced earthquakes linked to disposal wells, and most have passed rules or laws that address the risk to public safety. No such rules are being considered in Oklahoma, but in September 2013 the Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, ordered a disposal well operator in south-central Oklahoma to reduce the pressure and volume of waste fluid injection after a swarm of earthquakes struck near Marietta in Love County.
The Corporation Commission on Thursday will consider new rules that would require operators of some disposal operators to capture more pressure and volume measurements — data researchers say are vital to studying the issue.
Oklahoma Wonders Why The Earth Is Shaking
An unusually high number of tremors have shaken the state lately, leading some to point their fingers at the emerging hydraulic fracturing industry, though the real culprit might be a type of wastewater storage system.
No strangers to nature’s fury, Oklahomans grow up accustomed scorching heat, blizzards, wrecking-ball thunderstorms and tornadoes. What they don’t see a lot of are earthquakes, which have been rattling the Sooner State with rare frequency of late — at least 115 earthquakes of varying intensities in the last week.
“You hear a loud ‘WAM!’ and you hear this loud rattle-rattle-rattle,” said Tracey Romberger, who lives near the center of this latest swarm of earthquakes between Oklahoma City and the town of Guthrie. She described the sound as “like somebody was dropping a bomb, or a cannon going off.”
The question on everyone’s mind is: why? The area has been seismically active since time immemorial but the latest swarm of earthquakes is unheard of. According to earthquake monitors EQ Charts, between 1990 and 2008 there were between 0 and 11 earthquakes of magnitude 2.0 or greater in Oklahoma every year. In 2009 there were 49. In 2010 there were 180. In 2013 there were 291, and so far in 2014 there have been 59-plus and counting. More than a dozen notable earthquakes have shaken north-central Oklahoma in the past three days.
“It’s incredibly unusual,” said Austin Holland, a research seismologist with the Oklahoma Geologic Survey. “We’ve had swarms that are similar in nature but I don’t think we’ve had one with quite the numbers we’ve had.”
State authorities are now trying to get the bottom of the unusual seismic activity. Holland is amassing resources and data to figure out what might be to blame, and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which oversees the oil and gas industry, has already proposed new testing and monitoring requirements for wells injected with drilling wastewater, which some have blamed for the increase in earthquakes. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking“, involving explosions being set off underground, has also been blamed by some for the swarm.
Spent drilling water injected back into the ground for storage at high pressure, some scientists believe, may be forcing fault lines under pressure to shift. Katie Keranen, a geophysics professor at Cornell, says “the evidence is strong” that the earthquakes are caused by fracking and wastewater disposal, both of which have become more frequent amid today’s boom in oil and gas drilling.
But others scoff at the notion that fracking might be connected to seismic activity. “I work with geologists and petroleum engineers on a daily basis and they are of the opinion that [fracking] is not causing the earthquakes,” said Eric King, an attorney who works with the oil and gas industry, comparing the earthquake swarm to climate fluctuations. “We didn’t have cold weather in Oklahoma for a lot of years but we’re having it this year,” he said.
It’s true that Oklahoma has a history of earthquake swarms that spike and then die down, but it’s also true that humans have caused earthquakes in the past. And previous swarms have been nowhere near as serious as this latest one. “We do know there have been some earthquakes caused by oil and gas activity in the state,” Holland, the research seismologist, said. “The hard part is figuring out which is which.”
In the meantime, Oklahoma is steeling itself for worse quakes in the future, as each earthquake increases the likelihood that a worse earthquake will follow. That’s a prospect that could put Oklahomans on edge. “It scares you a little bit,” says Romberger. “Makes you jump.”
http://time.com/8126/oklahoma-wonders-why-the-earth-is-shaking/
Scientists are studying = Moonbats are hoping
ping